Hülsmann went to high school in a town with "the highest communist voter percentage in all of Western Germany" and started public speaking at the age of 15. After mandatory military service, he went on to study industrial engineering at the Technical University of Berlin, from 1986 to 1992. In the 1991-92 academic year, he participated in an exchange program with Toulouse Business School in France. There he wrote a thesis comparing the neo-marxistregulation school to the ordo-liberalFreiburg School. He also started studying the writings of the Austrian School. After the year in Toulouse, he returned to Berlin for doctoral studies under Hans-Hermann Lechner and obtained his PhD in economics in 1996. In January 1997, Lew Rockwell commissioned Hülsmann to write a Mises biography, a project that he would eventually complete in 2007. In 2004, he was appointed to a full professorship at the University of Angers.
Academic authorship
Hülsmann is the author of seven books, has edited or co-edited six other books, and published numerous journal articles and book chapters. His writings have been translated into twenty languages. His 2008 book The Ethics of Money Production has been translated into German, French, Italian, Romanian, Polish, and Chinese. His 2007 book Mises – The Last Knight of Liberalism has been translated into Russian and Chinese. Both books received numerous reviews and made it into Barron's recommended reading lists. The Last Knight of Liberalism is the only full-blown biography of Ludwig von Mises and Hülsmann’s most-cited publication. It received a slating from Bruce Caldwell, while the other reviews have been overwhelmingly positive. Economic historian Robert Higgs praised it as "a magnificent scholarly achievement." In a lengthy review, the German national newspaper, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, called it "a literary event" and considered the work to "set standards" of biographical work. In September 2016, the Renmin University of China organized a full-day conference around the Chinese edition of the book. He has also become known as an economist who correctly anticipated the financial crisis of 2001; as an advocate of deflation.; as a staunch critic of fractional-reserve banking; as a critic of the time-preference theory of interest; for his "reconsideration" of Austrian Capital Theory, opening new perspectives on the venerable Cambridge capital controversy; and as a proponent of the idea that economic laws are counterfactuala priori laws, rather than empirical regularities.
Hülsmann has written for various press outlets in Europe, for example, for national magazines such as Schweizer Monat, La Tribune, Die Zeit, and Der Standard, and for business magazines such as Wirtschaftswoche. For several years, he has authored a monthly column for the German libertarian magazine, eigentümlich frei.
Translations
Hülsmann has translated or co-translated Murray N. Rothbard’s books The Ethics of Liberty and What Has Government Done to Our Money?, Ralph Raico’s Die Partei der Freiheit and Ludwig von Mises’ Bureaucracy, as well as Gustave de Molinari's De la production de la sécurité into German.
